


cabin fever dream

by Lauren (notalwaysweak)



Category: Newsflesh Trilogy - Mira Grant, The Big Bang Theory (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Zombies, Angst, F/M, I Mean It About the Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-13
Updated: 2015-02-13
Packaged: 2018-03-11 07:43:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3319547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's simple enough. In July 2014 Penny is alone at home; the others are in San Diego for Comic-Con.</p><p>Then there are zombies, and nothing will be the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Late August, 2014: Pasadena, California

**Author's Note:**

  * For [damalur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/damalur/gifts).



> This fic is a fusion rather than a crossover, so it's the TBBT characters in Mira Grant's _Newsflesh_ 'verse, more or less. This means that this fic contains spoilers for _Newsflesh_ , in particular the novella _San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats_. If you haven't read that and intend to, please read it before you read this. Conversely, if you've read _San Diego 2014_ , you probably already have some idea of the places this fic's going to go. All I can say is read the tags and be mindful of your reading choices.
> 
> TBBT characters belong to CBS and so on and I am making no financial gain from this work of fan fiction.
> 
> The _Newsflesh_ 'verse belongs to Mira Grant, although I can't see her reading this 'cause last time we talked she wasn't watching TBBT any more. The title 'cabin fever dream' is drawn from one of the character's blogs in _Deadline_.
> 
> This fic was betaed by damalur, for which I humbly thank her; her encouragement was a big part of why I finished it.

Nobody out there knocks on doors anymore. Either they bang mindlessly into them and wander away when they don’t open, or they kick them in and sweep the room with gunfire. So when Penny’s sitting on her couch cleaning her rifle and hears that old triple knock, her heart thumps in response.

It only comes once. Then there’s the slide and thud of a body hitting the floor.

She peeks out of the peephole. Nothing. Opens the door on the chain and sees him there, alone, maybe breathing, maybe not.

Maybe infected, maybe not.

She grabs his hand and pulls it into her apartment through the crack in the door, and shoves his finger into a testing kit. He flinches as the needle digs into his skin, or is she imagining it? The light flickers red-green-red-green and finally remains a steady green.

His name has been part of a list engraved on her heart for over a month now, the they-didn’t-make-it list. She’s been assuming that since Comic-Con was put under quarantine, none of the gang made it.

She’s managed phone calls back and forth to establish that her father is a made-it; her brother, a didn’t-make-it. Her mother and sister were static on a downed phone line somewhere between Pasadena and Omaha. If her father hadn’t been away fishing, maybe he’d be static too. Her brother, well, there aren’t a lot of places to run in a prison yard.

She had to break it to Priya that she thinks Raj is dead; Priya, sounding eerily calm, told her that she knew, that so were their parents and the rest of her siblings, and from the sounds of the screaming in the background Penny wasn’t sure that Priya had all that long left herself.

Leonard. Sheldon. Amy. Bernadette. Stuart. Howard.

San Diego. India. Earth.

Leslie Winkle is a made-it and running a small fortification in what’s left of Caltech.

Sheldon’s mom and sister are maybes; Howard’s mom, a didn’t-make-it.

Leonard’s mom was on a plane when the outbreak started and locked herself in the bathroom until the uninfected pilot brought the plane into a bumpy landing in Cleveland and the two of them got out alive; she’s being held in a CDC testing center, spending half her time as doctor and half her time as patient.

So. Now. Sheldon. _How_?

She pushes his arm back out and definitely hears a huff of disapproval, which is actually kind of a good sign, but she has to do it so she can open the door to get him inside. He’s all legs and arms and lolling head and she can’t figure out how come he’s so incapacitated until she sees the ugly wound on his left temple and then she understands. Concussion. She can do something about that, probably.

She gets him onto the couch and locks and bolts the door before turning back to Sheldon. His eyes are closed, and he’s mumbling incoherently. She touches the bruise on his temple, and he winces, eyes still shut. His chest hitches every few breaths, and she has the feeling he’s injured there as well. His face and hands are deeply tanned. He has a month of scruffy beard and looks more like Wil Wheaton than she’d ever thought possible. A hysterical giggle bubbles up in her chest, and she slaps her hand across her mouth to stop it.

Penny just hopes that the home-brew testing kit works. She doesn’t know the science behind it, only that it’s based on a modified diabetes testing kit, and that the people Leslie is working with developed it based on research that came out of India.

Not that India’s done so well since the outbreak.

“If you test yourself and get a red light, end it,” Leslie had said brusquely. “Or anyone else you happen to run into.” A faint look of sadness had crossed her face. “Let me know if any green lights come home to you.”

Penny had nodded and stashed the box of testing kits in her backpack on top of the boxes of ammo, which was what she’d actually left the apartment for. Caltech had been a detour, out of curiosity.

Now she looks at Sheldon and at the discarded testing kit and heaves a sigh. There’s really only one way to be sure he hasn’t been bitten, and that’s to look. Besides, he smells like he could use a bath or three.

So it’s off the couch and into the bathroom, settling his too-skinny form onto the bathmat, with a lavender heat pack for a makeshift pillow. She starts the water running and then begins to strip him. Shirts off over his head one at a time and a soft gasp at the sight of his bruised ribcage, purple along the bones and yellow in between, all down his right side. Aside from that he’s all pale in contrast to the unfamiliar tan. Shoes and socks off; at least his feet are okay, long and arched and delicate somehow, like his hands (which are scratched but not bitten, and a spot of blood has welled up where the needle went in). They’re a little blistered, but that’s all.

Then she takes a deep breath and unbuckles his belt.

His long legs are bare of bite marks, although they are scratched and bruised in places, none so badly as his ribs. She nudges him onto his side and checks his butt, which is undignified as hell, but too bad. She steadfastly avoids looking at his genitals—highly unlikely bite zone, this is _Sheldon_ she’s looking at, after all—but something in his body is responding to her proximity because he’s stirring into arousal. So she does the only thing that she can do, which is to pick him up and put him as unsplashily as possible into the bath.

The thing is that the hot water isn’t exactly working all that well, so the water’s mostly cool. Lukewarm, maybe. Tepid, if she’s honest. Cold enough, anyway, that his eyes snap open and he inhales a long sharp breath that makes him wince in pain and grab at his ribs.

Then his eyes focus on her and he says, “Penny.”

She has just enough time to grab his head and hold it up before he faints.

She washes him with one hand and supports his head with the other, feeling almost like she’s bathing an oversized baby. She’s not sure how well she does with the whole washing thing, but his scratches and cuts are clean by the time she’s done and while the wounds are still ugly, they’re not dirty. She can’t wash his hair properly; she does it with soap and hopes he won’t mind the deviation from routine, and then a laugh escapes her because the entire planet has deviated from routine thanks to this stupid goddamned virus.

Drying him off is damn near impossible. In the end she drags him back to the bedroom and spreads towels on the bed before rolling him onto it. Her lower back is singing with pain by the time that she’s done, and he’s shivering uncontrollably.

Penny piles blankets on him, unlaces and pulls off her boots, sets the rifle on the nightstand, and crawls in with him, hugging him close, sharing her warmth.

“Penny,” he whispers. “You’re alive.”

“Of course I am.”

“Thank God... thank God you hate Comic-Con.”

She smiles and presses her lips to his temple.

She hasn’t slept a full night through in a month, not even since boarding up the windows, but she thinks that tonight might just be an exception. She starts in on “Soft Kitty”; keeps singing it for herself even after his body relaxes in her arms.

* * *

The story comes out in fits and starts over the next two days as he drifts in and out of consciousness.

“We almost didn’t go,” is his nearly constant refrain. “If I hadn’t—”

She figures it out: he blames himself, because he was the one who got the passes for the con via James Earl Jones. (She thinks. Maybe he’s hallucinating that part.) If that hadn’t happened, Leonard and Raj and Howard would be across the hall now. Amy and Bernadette would be here with her, learning how to shoot, or maybe at Caltech with Leslie’s team, looking into the how and the why of everything. A neurobiologist and a microbiologist would be perfect down there. Stuart—well, he went on an exhibitor’s pass, but maybe—from what she can tell, from what Sheldon’s saying, there might have been time. Sheldon even mourns Wil, which whom he had an ongoing love-hate relationship.

As for Sheldon himself, the explanation turns out to be stupidly simple. At the time that the Convention Center went into lockdown, he was lying in a darkened hotel room, a cool washcloth on his forehead. Saved from the zombie apocalypse by something as mundane as a migraine.

“We almost didn’t go,” he says, every time he surfaces again from sleep.

And: “I wish I’d never met Darth Vader.”

Penny tries to tell him it’s not his fault, but she knows he won’t believe it, that he’ll never believe it.

During one of his more lucid moments: “I made Amy leave me. I made her leave me alone. I made her go with Bernadette.”

“Sweetie... at least they had each other,” Penny says, hearing the words hollow in her own ears, how pointless they must sound to Sheldon.

“If I’d let her stay to look after me...” He frets at the blanket with his fingers, twisting. “It was in the relationship agreement to look after each other when we’re sick.”

There is literally nothing that Penny can say to that, so she doesn’t.

* * *

She has to go out. She _has_ to. Food and ammo and water. And tampons, because she really should have taken Sheldon’s advice about buying them in bulk. If only she’d foreseen the zombie apocalypse. Silly Penny.

Sheldon doesn’t want her to leave the apartment.

(She doesn’t want to leave him.)

“This isn’t an argument I want to have,” Penny says, loading the handgun for him. Sheldon sits with his back to the refrigerator door, knees drawn up to his chest, ignoring the fact that it has smelled awful for weeks even though she tried to throw the worst stuff out, but he takes the gun when she presses it into his hand.

The shotgun is in her hands, the baseball bat strapped across her back along with an empty backpack. The peephole is clear. Penny lifts the gun and starts down the stairs.

Pasadena is silent, terrifying. Penny hurries through the deserted streets, all of her senses on red alert. Every sighing breeze sounds like ragged moaning. She uses wrecked cars as cover and prays that Caltech is still a safe place.

It is a four mile journey. A motorbike would be faster but make her a target. A car is out of the question. She’s been looking for a bike, but apparently she is not quite in the most health-conscious part of California. At the same time, though, the stretch and burn of working her muscles is enjoyable, as is the fresh air. She may not be able to jog every morning, but she can still work out in her apartment, and so she can do four miles in less than forty minutes. Coming back, pack loaded—hopefully—will be the hard part.

She knows squat about the Caltech buildings, except:

  1.        The research team are in the Beckman Laboratory.
  2.       To get there she has to cross the _wide_ open Beckman Lawn.
  3.       Doing so makes her feel like peeing herself.



(She’s not a fan of 2 or 3.)

Penny steps out of the tree line and starts walking. Listening. Scanning before and behind and up and side to side. She can see a face at one of the upper windows. A face and a body-shape and a gun.

Ten yards out from the looming building’s base, one of the doors cracks open and the first thing she sees is another gun. Right behind it, though, is Leslie’s face, drawn white and anxious. She’s wearing goggles and a surgical mask and gloves.

“Stop, stop there. Whatever you’re looking for, I don’t think we can help you,” she calls.

“How come?”

“There’s a problem with trying to find a cure for any virus, and that is that you get exposed to the virus in the process.”

“Yeah, but as long as you’re not biting each other...”

“Guess again, Barbie—I’m not wearing these as a fashion statement.” Leslie taps the goggles. “Just wash your hands really well if you come into contact with blood. Or saliva. Or semen, if you’re into screwing undead guys.”

“Ew.”

“Sorry. I’ve been setting a new bar for black humor.”

“So it—should I be trying to find gloves and stuff?”

Leslie bends down and tosses her a bag, low and fast. Penny crouches and catches it against her chest. A box of gloves, a box of masks.

“Won’t you need these?”

“Not necessarily for much longer.” Leslie shakes her head. “No, we’re not all dead yet. We’ve been in touch with the CDC and they’re going to try to airlift us out.”

“Take us with you,” Penny says impulsively, at the same time wondering if she’ll ever be able to extract Sheldon from the apartment.

“Who’s ‘us’?”

“Sheldon came home.”

Leslie laughs. “Of all the unkillable cockroaches... look. We don’t know for sure about the CDC, and you—if you come in here it’s a one-way street.” She rolls her eyes upward to where the watchful gunman is. “If you come in and then go back out, they’ll shoot you. If I try to leave with you, they’ll shoot me and probably you as well. The thing with the blood contact is that it can take longer to take hold than a bite—so we don’t always know who’s a danger and who isn’t.”

“Shit, Leslie—” Penny reaches a hand out to her.

Leslie waves her off. “Go. Tell Doctor Dumbass I said hi. We don’t need him down here anyway; we’ve got enough non-biology specialists who’re trying to learn how to use all the shit in these labs. Besides, I’d probably bite him myself.”

“What if you _do_ get airlifted out?”

“Then I’ll tell the CDC to make a pit stop by your building. I slept with Leonard too, remember? I _do_ know where you live. And right now, if it’s the two of you and you’re _sure_ he’s not infected, it’s probably the safest place for you to be.” Leslie shoo-fly waves her off again. “Go on, get out of here.”

Penny gets. She’s not happy about it. She can’t shake the feeling that she’s not going to see Leslie again.

* * *

After that, “grocery shopping” is anticlimactic, even though she has to shoot three zombies who shamble into the store while she’s picking through the remaining cans, trying to figure out what will be the most edible. Her power and lights have been inconsistent. She can’t remember when her phone was last functional. She’s got the hang of dashing to the kitchen every time the power does come on, making stuff hot, usually tinned spaghetti, and wolfing it down just for the sake of having hot food. As far as she can tell from the radio when it’s working, there are a lot of people out there in tight spots like hers.

Thinking of the radio makes her realize that if she had a CB setup, maybe she could talk to other people, and she slaps her forehead, standing there in the middle of aisle five amidst cleared shelves and the floor all covered in spilled macaroni.

“Why didn’t you think of that before, idiot?” she mutters aloud, and a low moan answers her from the other side of the shelves. Penny ducks and shoots through the shelves. The moaning stops.

Maybe it’s time to throw caution to the wind. Fuck it, she has two mouths to feed now. So she loads up her pack with an extra big bag of rice, and more cans than usual, and throws a six-pack of Diet Coke on top for a special treat.

Then she goes scooter hunting.

When the outbreak happened, not everyone had the courtesy to die quietly at home and stay there. The number of cars along California Boulevard that aren’t parked so much as crashed attest to that. So it’s not hard for Penny to find a Vespa that she can use, one with a rack she can tie her pack to. No helmet, but if she falls, cracking her skull is honestly the least of her worries.

She rides with the gun balanced across her knees, puttering at maybe twenty miles an hour, but it’s so much faster than walking, and the breeze feels delicious against her sweat-beaded, anxious skin.

She’s right about the noise attracting the zombies, though. By the time that she’s gone half a mile she has company. And when there are four of them, falling behind her as she accelerates, their moaning draws others, and all of a sudden Penny is discovering what happens when there’s a pack instead of just the singletons that she picks off from behind her boarded windows.

It’s as if they start to _think_.

Penny turns onto Los Robles, realizes that she’s going to lead them straight to her building, and goes left onto Colorado, taking the corner at thirty miles an hour, which is way faster than she should be going considering the car pileups everywhere. Her heart is thumping in her ears and the gathering moans echo off the storefronts and walls all around her.

Her plan is to go up Euclid and eventually cut back to Los Robles in the hope that the smaller streets might be quieter, but it’s somewhat stymied as she rounds the corner and is confronted with a mob arrayed a little further up the road, outside the town hall. She has a moment to wonder whether they died there or whether she’s just interrupted a zombie council meeting before she takes the first available turn, skidding hard left with their hands reaching for her.

After that she doesn’t care about anything but heading north, keeping the gun safe, and not hitting anything. She’s constantly aware of the roar of the bike’s engine. The wind in her face no longer feels quite so lovely; it feels like fear and flight now.

She’s not even sure what street she’s on any more when she sees the window display of radios. Well, what’s left of it. Smashed glass, more empty spots on the shelves than anything else. But it’s not just a music store, not just _that_ sort of radio, no, it’s got what she wants, and Penny stops the bike, careful to settle it on its kickstand and not let it fall. She hefts the gun, uses the butt to knock the rest of the glass out of her way, and pulls the CB out, tucking it under her arm.

That’s when the hand—scrabbling, seeking—lands on her shoulder.

Penny swings round, dropping the radio, crashing the shotgun into the zombie’s chest. It falls back a step. So does she, lining up the head shot, and because maybe she’s still in the splatter zone and she’s mindful of what Leslie said about bodily fluids, she closes her eyes and squeezes the trigger.

She doesn’t want to know what the wet stuff is that hits her. She doesn’t ever want to know.

Penny pulls her shirt off, still blind, and uses the ( _please be_ ) clean inside to scrub at her face and hands, trying to remove any gore before she opens her eyes again. She throws the shirt away. Walking around in a bra and jeans is not how she wants to spend the rest of her day; she’d better hurry before she loses any more clothing.

The CB seems to be clean but she’s not risking it so she grabs a different one, mindful of the glass, stuffs it into the pack, and rolls the last little way home.

* * *

Mrs. Vartabedian used to keep roses in the tiny courtyard along the side of their building, and Penny grabs the garden hose and rinses and rinses and rinses, heedless of how frigid the water is.

She peeks between the browning ornamental bushes. There are three zombies at the front fucking door of the building. She could shoot them, but now she knows that making too much noise (or maybe it’s just having the affront to be alive when they are dead) will draw others.

So she swings the pack up onto the fire escape, jumps, drags herself up onto the ladder, and then starts the slow climb upward. Either the roof door will be open (probably, it’s been broken for a couple of years now), or it will be closed and locked, in which case she’s going to introduce it to a couple of bullets.

The door is open. Penny drags herself wearily down the stairs and knocks at her own front door so that she doesn’t scare Sheldon.

As soon as she’s in and the door is closed he’s hugging her, his arms panic-tight, his clothes scratchy on her bare skin.

“I thought you were dead. I heard gunshots and then I didn’t hear you on the stairs and I thought you were dead.”

Penny puts her own arms around his waist. “It’s okay, Sheldon, I’m okay, they didn’t get me. It’s okay, Moonpie...” She keeps talking, low and soothing, barely aware of what she’s saying, only wanting to calm the shaking out of his too-lean frame.

(He’s shaved the beard, finally. It makes his face look even more gaunt.)

She walks him over to the couch and encourages him to sit down. He’s still clinging to her when he does, apparently heedless of her current state of semi-undress.

“I can’t lose you too,” he says into her hair.

“Do we know for sure the others are all...”

“Have you been online since July twenty-third?”

Penny thinks back. “A little? We lost power for a while and when it came back on I couldn’t remember the wifi password, so I just used my phone, but then the power went out again and I couldn’t charge it. I’ve been listening to the radio. That has batteries.”

“What exactly did you hear?” He sits up and moves his hands to her shoulders, looking straight into her eyes.

“That the Convention Center got quarantined, and they don’t think anyone got out after the doors closed.”

“Quarantined,” Sheldon says slowly. His face is sweetly calm, but his fingertips are digging into her skin. “Is that what they said?”

“Well, yeah. Like, until they could evacuate people. Sheldon... what did they do?”

His eyes show the pain of the truth and suddenly she doesn’t want him to speak.

“They blew it up, Penny. They dropped a bomb on the Convention Center. Nobody who was in there when the doors closed got out alive.”

* * *

Their names run through her head in a constant litany as she showers, dresses, and goes back to the living room to sort out the treasures from her grocery run. She discovers that Sheldon has cleaned the refrigerator; it smells strongly of lemon, which is a vast improvement over... well, before.

Sheldon is tinkering with her laptop. “Thirty-five percent battery,” he remarks. “The wifi appears to be working. All hail the computing cloud. I’d already compiled the relevant Facebook and Twitter statuses and so forth, so if I...” He clicks something. “There. You can read it offline.”

“What am I reading?” Penny asks, wary.

“The truth.”

Penny wants to take the laptop out into the hall, force the elevator doors open, and drop the laptop down the shaft.

She sits down beside Sheldon. The document—a PDF amalgamation of various web pages, judging from the previews down the side—is titled “San Diego 2014”. There’s nothing to give her a real clue about the contents.


	2. July 24th, 2014: San Diego, California

It starts with Howard and Bernadette on Facebook, with occasional input by Raj, talking about the hotel rooms, then about the heat, then about their cosplays for the weekend. So far as she’s ever known Preview Night’s not a big costume thing, but there’s a photo of the three of them together, dressed in their regular clothes, smiling.

Howard, posting about the _Space Crime Continuum_ panel. Yet another one of their shows that she’s never quite gotten into.

Bernadette, concerned about Sheldon. (With comments from Amy. A short conversation full of sweet concern. Penny remembers seeing it in passing now. She’s even liked a couple of their remarks. Funny how the end of the world can make you forget that kind of things.)

Then there’s a gap that Sheldon has marked with a timestamp and question marks.

After the gap, the first thing is a message from Amy on Sheldon’s Facebook wall, telling him not to come anywhere near the Center. _I don’t know what’s happening, exactly, but people are talking about evacuating and I don’t want you getting caught in a stampede._

Penny looks sidelong at Sheldon, who is staring straight ahead, lower lip caught between his teeth. She slips her hand into his.

Stuart making a crack about how nobody should expect discounts just because they’re under quarantine.

Raj talking about weird noises in the dark.

A brief back and forth between Stuart and Raj on Twitter about the latter bringing the former something from the food court. She used to think the boys were weird for having online conversations instead of just calling each other, but now she reads each precious word, each last word, and thinks maybe it’s a blessing that the world has turned to such open forms of conversation.

Howard’s Instagram: cosplayers in wary groups with smiles that don’t quite reach their eyes and strange lighting that is not from any photo filter.

Amy to Sheldon: _They’re saying it’s zombies, Sheldon. It seems scientifically impossible but there are people out there who aren’t acting like people any more._

Amy to Penny: _Bestie, if you can turn on the news, can you tell us what’s going on?_

* * *

“You never told her anything.”

“My Facebook notifications have been screwed for months.” Penny looks at at the question. If she’d gotten the notification and put the television on, assuming that she had reception, she would have been able to tell Amy what was going on. That there was a quarantine. That... what did the radio say? That they had specialists reviewing the situation.

But then what would she have said when they announced that the bomb was going to drop?

* * *

Sheldon to Amy, on her Facebook wall: _The current reports indicate that they’re intending to evacuate you but they have to assess the safest way to do it without endangering anyone. Stay with the others. Stay safe. Don’t go anywhere alone._

Leonard to Penny, on her Facebook wall: _Hey, Penny. Just tried to call you but the phones aren’t working very well in here. I’m okay, don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll be out of here soon._

Wil, on Twitter: _Hey, @AnneWheaton, I’ll be home late. Put some beer on ice for me._

Raj to Howard, also on Twitter: _I’m not spooning with you again if it gets too cold in here #whathappensinthearctic_

Howard to Raj: _So who ARE you spooning with then?_

Bernadette to Howard and Raj, with Stuart pinged at the end: _#justkeepdatingthepossum_

Stuart to the other three: _I HATE YOU ALL except I do appreciate these cheese fries._

Sheldon, group message on Facebook to all: _I suggest you all stick together and attempt to fortify Stuart’s booth or find somewhere safer if possible. You may be in there for some time._

Sheldon to Amy, private Facebook message: _I wish you had stayed with me._

* * *

“Oh, Sheldon.”

He doesn’t respond, but his hand tightens on hers. His fingers squeeze the fine band of her engagement ring, imprinting it deeper into her skin. The stone must be digging into his skin, too, but he doesn’t react.

* * *

The next section, one of Raj’s blog entries that for a change isn’t awful poetry, paints a more coherent picture, one that isn’t a connect the dots without numbers. They are all together: Raj, Howard, and Bernadette; Amy and Leonard and Stuart. They’re all okay except that Howard has been kvetching about a fever.

_Since none of us are that kind of doctor, Bernadette finally shut him up with a couple of Midol and a bottle of water. Naturally he’s still sitting on his ass complaining while the rest of us work._

They’ve extended Stuart’s booth space into the empty booth beside it, since it seems his neighbor didn’t show up for Preview Night. Lucky neighbor.

_Amy keeps talking about how it’s not possible for there to be zombies out there. I don’t know. I’ve heard things in the dark that don’t sound like people any more. Bernadette’s read some of the news posts that are popping up and I don’t like the way she keeps frowning, but she keeps saying we’ll be okay._

_I don’t know if we’re going to be okay. I don’t think most of the people in here think we’re going to be okay. But it’s only just after midnight. Maybe the sun will come up tomorrow and the doors will open and we’ll get out just fine._

_Penny’s looking after Cinnamon, so at least they should be okay, unless there’s another Chocolate Incident._

* * *

This last makes Penny flinch. She _was_ looking after Cinnamon. The little dog had been a bit bewildered by all the mess in her apartment at first, but had settled in fine.

Then she’d been in the dog park, and Cinnamon had been off her leash, and... well. Penny likes to think that Cinnamon just ran off somewhere, rather than the alternative. For her own part, she’d been eyeing a man who was coming toward her, walking like he was drunk, and when he’d gotten close enough for her to see the blood around his mouth she’d bolted.

That was her first zombie.

That was when she’d pelted up all four flights of stairs, barricaded the door, and started believing that it was real. When she’d found her bat and sat with it on her lap as she used her dying phone to locate the nearest gun store.

She wishes she could apologize to Raj for losing his dog, but that’s no longer an option.

“There’s not much more,” Sheldon says, and Penny sees that the side scroll bar is near the end of the document. She doesn’t want to keep reading. She wants to pretend there’s still hope.

* * *

The next thing makes her laugh-cry, a hiccuping teary sound, because it’s a _selfie_. The six of them are squeezed in all together, Howard on one end looking drawn and pale, Stuart at the other end with his head tilted against Raj’s in a way that she feels isn’t just to make sure he gets into the shot. Leonard’s got his hands held up in one of those tween heart signs.

None of them are smiling, not really.

* * *

Bernadette’s Facebook: _Howie says he’s going to look for food. He says he’ll be okay because he’s taking a LARP sword with him. I don’t think I believe him._

Amy to Sheldon, private Facebook message: _I love you._

Sheldon to Amy, private Facebook message: _I love you, too._

* * *

Sheldon’s fingers feel like bones locked around her hand.

* * *

Leonard to Penny, on her Facebook wall: _Lock yourself in at your place and wait until you hear that it’s safe. Don’t go anywhere. Well, I guess you can go to our place if you run out of coffee, but don’t drink Sheldon’s tea. I love you._

* * *

That’s all there is.


	3. Early September, 2014: Pasadena, California

She moves mechanically around the apartment, because even with the weight of all those words in her head they still need to eat. The power hasn’t been on for a few days in a row now; maybe the last electrician in Pasadena got eaten.

There’s another way, though.

Sheldon cringes when she tells him they’re going to the roof, but the promise of actual hot food assuages his fear, and he carries the grocery bag while she carries the shotgun.

The second time the power went out, she’d thought it wouldn’t come back on ever again, and so there’s a stack of firewood on the roof that she brought up the stairs a few sticks at a time, thinking more signal fire than cooking fire. She tells Sheldon this as she builds the fire: paper, kindling, and wood.

“I’m sure the neighbors were delighted to hear you thundering up and down the stairs,” he says.

Snide remarks. Good. He’s returning to normal.

“We don’t have any neighbors now,” she says, which probably doesn’t help the whole returning to normal thing, but he needs to know.

“Maybe more fortifications are in order, then. If I could access the building despite my weakened state, anything could get in.”

Penny sparks the lighter and doesn’t tell Sheldon that she left the front door wide open precisely because she didn’t know what state they’d all come back in.

If they all came back.

If any of them came back.

Instead, she says, “Do you want to talk about it?”

Sheldon looks down at his hands. There are still a couple of long scabs on his forearms. She’s not sure what condition his bruises are in.

“No,” he says. “Not yet.”

“Okay.” Penny gets on with stoking the fire. She has a cast iron saucepan that will work over the heat. Chicken soup, thinned down from the initial gelid blob with long-life milk. It would be nicer with bread rolls or biscuits, but she hasn’t exactly been able to get to a bakery lately.

“Is there more milk?” Sheldon asks.

“Um... yes, some.”

“Do you have flour?”

“Maybe?”

Sheldon unfolds his body, stretches, and looks toward the open door back down into the building. He doesn’t have to say anything for Penny to know he wants company. She moves the saucepan off the heat, picks up the gun, and leads the way back down to the fourth floor.

* * *

Sheldon has flour, and he finds a stick of butter in the freezer that’s not exactly frozen but is at least not runny. He pokes around in the cupboards.

“Did you _loot_ here?”

“Not until week three.” She manages a smile. “I figured I’d add it to what I owe Leonard for the rent.”

Sheldon piles his finds into a mixing bowl, drops a wooden spoon in as well, and stacks a roll of tinfoil on the top.

“I don’t know how well this will work,” he says as they go back upstairs.

“Boy Scouts?”

Sheldon shakes his head. “Meemaw.”

That’s when Penny remembers that she never got in contact with any of the Coopers. “Have you heard from her? Or your mom?”

“Missy left me a voicemail at the beginning to say that she was going to find them.” He looks like he wants to say something else, but Penny doesn’t push it. She double-checks that the roof door will open again if she closes it, and then pulls it tightly closed. Looking over at the dark void every few seconds isn’t doing wonders for her mental stability.

* * *

Sheldon’s biscuits are misshapen and not as crisp on the outside as they could be, but they’re delicious. There’s butter left over to spread on them, and they hold together well when dunked in the chicken soup, soaking up the liquid, absorbing the flavor. Both of them eat until they’re thoroughly full and then just sit by the fire. It’s a mild night, so the extra heat isn’t really necessary, but the light is soothing; even with the way that the flames flicker it’s still brighter than the candlelit apartment.

“Raj would have appreciated the sky tonight,” Sheldon says.

Penny looks up. There’s decidedly less haze than there used to be. She knows that the world hasn’t stopped completely, that there are people out there on the radio (and that reminds her that she needs  to try the CB setup), but right now it feels like they could be the last two people left on the planet.

A meteor scratches light across the indigo sky.

“Make a wish,” Penny says.

Sheldon doesn’t say anything out loud, but his hand creeps into Penny’s, and she threads her fingers around his.

She doesn’t say anything out loud either, because she’s already on the verge of tears.

“There’s wine,” is what she does say after a little while, and Sheldon, for once, doesn’t turn down the offer of alcohol.

* * *

They talk about everyone but Leonard and Amy.

* * *

When they go to bed that night, Sheldon’s the one to reach out for Penny, instead of her curling around him to warm him up. His arm tucks awkwardly around her shoulders. She wriggles a little, trying to get it settled behind her neck. He moves with her in response to her discomfort, and they end up snuggled together, face to face, his breath warm on her lips, he’s so close.

It doesn’t actually strike Penny as weird, at first; they’ve been sharing her bed since he came home, because 4A is full of ghosts. And they’ve been holding on to each other for warmth—no, for comfort. It’s not very Sheldonesque, but if anything can change someone from mysophobic to clingy as hell, it’s the zombie apocalypse.

No, the weird part is when he kisses her.

His lips are dry, soft, a little chapped. He presses them uncertainly to hers, and Penny slips automatically into teaching mode, tilting her head a little for deeper contact and parting her lips to catch his lower lip between hers.

Sheldon makes a little surprised noise and that’s what shocks her back to reality.

“Sheldon, no.” She pulls away, or at least tries to, considering how closely entwined they are. “Leonard and Amy, remember?”

“I’m sorry, Penny. I thought—”

“Well, don’t.”

Sheldon lets go of her and rolls to face the wall. Penny settles onto her back and stares at the ceiling.

She hopes this doesn’t fuck everything up between them. She needs him. She can’t go back to being alone now.

It’s only as she’s finally slipping into sleep that she realizes that maybe it was his half-assed way of telling her how much he needs her, too.

* * *

Things aren’t fucked up between them. They’re not quite the same, either, but they’re not totally fucked up.

Sheldon loosens up a little and follows her around the building. She’s already done several checks over the last month, partly looking for company, partly for food, and partly to put bullets in a couple of her neighbors’ heads when they attempted to eat her. A bigger building might have had more survivors.

This time, it’s to lock the place up.

The downstairs foyer has a glass door to the outside world. They remedy that by dragging furniture out from the nearest apartments and building an inner wall. A thinking, living person will be able to find a way in. A zombie will not.

Sheldon takes on the job of going around each apartment and switching appliances off at the wall. “In case the power comes back on. We don’t want the building to burn down because someone’s microwave explodes.”

“Is that likely?”

“Not especially, but I don’t want to risk it.”

She leaves him to it. At least he’s participating. For her part, once the foyer is barricaded, she goes from apartment to apartment, double-checking that she hasn’t missed anyone alive. She hasn’t. Her mind works through the reasons why everyone is gone: Leonard, Comic-Con; Mrs. Vartabedian, dog show; Mr. Collier, bitten and shot. She gathers cans and boxes, makes half a dozen trips up and down the stairs, and calls Sheldon for lunch at noon. He’s cleaning people’s fridges out as well as turning switches off, and carts two giant trash bags full of slimy lettuce and questionable carrots out of the building’s back door without so much as a word of complaint.

(He does have a facial expression that suggests he is doing the most revolting job ever, but he doesn’t _say_ anything.)

They eat sandwiches—well, okay, leftover biscuits with peanut butter—up on the roof. It’s an obscenely sunny day. Sheldon has brought the radio up and turns the tuning dial slowly, scanning the frequencies. KPCC’s off the air, and she doesn’t think Caltech has its own radio station. KCBS is playing REM; someone has a sick sense of humor. There are a couple of Spanish stations, but they’re talking too fast for her to pick anything up, and besides, high school Spanish is years behind her now.

Apart from that it’s just static.

“We should try the CB,” Penny says.

Sheldon, frowning at the radio, perks right up. “I didn’t know you had one.”

“I only brought it home yesterday. I don’t even know if it works.”

Sheldon just gets up and goes down to 4B. All by himself. He doesn’t even look to see if she’s following him. Maybe it’s because he’s seen all of the building now, top to bottom, and is convinced that nothing’s waiting to jump out at him.

* * *

The CB works.

Sheldon talks to half a dozen truckers across the country, with varying reports of local conditions.

One of the guys took on a zombie mob in his Mack Pinnacle Sleeper and won. “Reckoned I had a fightin’ chance; my rig’s gotta weigh a few hundred times what they did, even all put together. Funny thing, though, I ain’t slept since. I keep wonderin’ if there’s, y’know, _bits_ in the engine, maybe.”

They all call Sheldon “Tex”, even after he explains where he’s from.

“Power’s out across Nevada ‘n’ Arizona, too. I’m headin’ east, Tex, and so should you. I can’t see the President doin’ without electricity for more’n a day.”

Penny, at a prudent distance from the mic, wonders whether the Mack driver should even be trying to leave Arizona, let alone trying to make it to the East Coast, if he hasn’t been sleeping. Sheldon opts not to share her thoughts.

Another of the guys is from Maine. He’s the one who says, “Just a sec,” and then there’s a ten-second burst of gunfire that sounds like a goddamned assault rifle.

“Are you all right?” Sheldon asks.

“I had company.”

Gradually the pieces come together: not everywhere is in as bad a shape as Pasadena. Other college towns have suffered similar fates, the zombie contagion spreading faster amongst the more gregarious populations. The scary part is that a couple of the drivers mention zombie animals. Granted, Pasadena isn’t exactly farm country, but Penny thinks uneasily of cats and dogs and mice and—

She spreads peanut butter onto another biscuit and wills her hands to stop shaking.

Aside from the truckers, there are a bunch of amateur enthusiasts, although Sheldon moves on faster from them, muttering, “Kids.” There’s one channel that’s got a recorded message admonishing them to get off the channel or answer to FEMA.

Sheldon finally hits the jackpot. Sort of. Penny’s writing a list of things to go out and look for, like some kind of generator to get the power going again, at least on the fourth floor, when she hears Sheldon yes-ma’aming someone and her ears prick up.

Two minutes later, they know three things:

  1. Everyone at Caltech is dead.
  2. Because of this, the CDC have no particular plans to drop in on Caltech.
  3. Because of _this_ , there’s no Get Out of Pasadena Free helicopter coming.



Sheldon over-and-outs the (polite, emotionless, robotic) doctor and turns the CB off, and then Penny has to grab his wrist to stop him from lifting the whole setup and hurling it off the rooftop. He drops it back onto the table and glares at her.

“You didn’t tell me there was anyone alive at Caltech.”

“I _did_! I told you Leslie was alive!” Penny remembers Leslie’s face, alive, if not strictly speaking well, as pale as the white surgical mask. “She was alive yesterday,” she says. “She was _fine_.” She lets go of Sheldon’s wrist and starts toward the stairs. “I have to go and see if it’s true.”

“But Penny—”

A thin whine shears off the end of Sheldon’s sentence. Penny stops in her tracks as a little plane, the first she’s seen in weeks, zooms into her field of view. Something falls from it, something solid and swift.

The hollow booming as it lands disabuses her of any notion that it might be a care package.

Sheldon gapes at the cloud beginning to form. Penny grabs his wrist again and drags him inside, hurrying helter-skelter down the stairs, bypassing their apartments for what may or may not be the safety of the ground floor. There’s no bomb shelter; she settles for the laundry room and, as the building begins to tremble, pulls Sheldon under the table with her.

The tremors could be worse. The bleach falls off the shelf and into the sink, the table jitters sideways, and one of the washing machines jerks into an unsteady spin cycle, water spurting out of a crack in the side. Looks like Sheldon won’t be doing his whites anytime soon. Plaster dust sifts down from the ceiling and walls, turning the water into a gritty mess. But it all stops after just a couple of minutes.

Sheldon’s pulled his knees up to his chest and is hugging them. His eyes are wider than she’s ever seen them. Penny puts her arms around him and murmurs whatever she thinks will help calm him down. Soothing words segue into “Soft Kitty”, and Sheldon doesn’t say anything about how being scared out of his wits isn’t a kind of sick.

She thinks she knows a little more about what he experienced during Comic-Con, now. She wonders how close the hotel was to the Convention Center, whether it was close enough to feel the impact of the bomb, or the aftershocks; if it triggered an earthquake there or if it was cleaner than that, over and done with in minutes.

“Why would they do that?” she asks.

It’s meant to be rhetorical, but Sheldon says, “It’s an attempt at containment.” He shrugs her arms away and crawls out from underneath the table. “They knew for sure that everyone was infected, so rather than have them escape...”

“But they were still doing research at Caltech. Leslie told me they were in touch with the CDC. They were going to get rescued.” Penny scoots out on her butt and Sheldon offers her a hand up.

“They probably told the CDC everything. Every bit of progress that they made. Their research won’t have been lost.” Sheldon does not look like he thinks that this is an acceptable outcome. “Anyway, Penny, who do you think decides when somewhere is irrecoverably infected?”

Penny twists her ring around her finger and doesn’t say anything.

* * *

Sheldon won’t come out to investigate with her. Penny leaves him inventorying the contents of his tea canisters and goes out with a handgun at the small of her back and the shotgun laid across her knees once she’s settled on the bike.

There’s really not much to look at. She makes a point of not getting too close, wary of Leslie’s warnings about transmissibility of the infection. With smoke still rising from the rubble, who knows what might be airborne along with it?

While she’s out, she rides down to a store that she looked up in an actual print _Yellow Pages_ (thank you, Mrs. Vartabedian, for being relentlessly anti-technology). She’s not going to be able to get the generator home; even the smallest one there weighs like eighty pounds, and there’s nowhere on the bike for it.

She’s half zoned out on the way home, thinking firewood, thinking maybe it’s time to move out of the building, when the bike splutters underneath her. She babies it to a gas station and it’s while she’s filling up, scanning the area around her in case the attendant’s sick of jerky and decides to come snack on her, that she sees the answer.

The camping supplies store’s windows are all smashed, but the merchandise is fairly intact. Either someone didn’t find what they were looking for, or someone else found them before they could find it. Penny doesn’t care as long as she can get in and out with what _she_ wants without being bitten.

Penny was never a Girl Scout, but her brother was a Boy Scout and, while he’d ended up adapting his old camping gear to uses that she’s sure he would never have earned a merit badge for, she still recognizes the camp stove that can run off a basic—and more importantly _light_ —gas bottle. They’ll be able to cook hot food, and she’ll be able to wash with water that’s not freezing.

Maybe when Sheldon’s capable of leaving the building, they can work out a way to get the generator, but for now the camp stove is triumph enough.

* * *

Sheldon is _delighted_ about the camp stove, and she’s surprised he’s so enthused—until the first lot of water is boiled and he pours it out into two mugs. Then the mingled scent of coffee for her and peppermint tea for him hits her nostrils and she catches on. He stirs a little creamer into hers and holds up a hand when she reaches for it.

“Wait. You don’t want to drink it if it curdles.”

The smell is driving her crazy; Penny thinks she’d drink it anyway even if it curdled. Or if he’d spit in it. He’s not that kind of barista, though. Nor is he the latte foam art kind. But he does know her preferred milk and sugar ratios, and when he at last gives her the mug and she takes the first scalding sip it’s delicious.

“God, Sheldon, this is amazing.”

He’s absorbed in the task of swirling his tea strainer around in his mug, the ball on the end of its chain tinking off the ceramic, but not so absorbed that he doesn’t smile at her.

They sit in 4A for a change, Sheldon in his spot and Penny in Leonard’s old chair, eating slightly stale cookies. Sheldon keeps looking over at the window; Penny didn’t barricade theirs, but she did draw the heavy curtains closed. He stands up after a few minutes and peeks out between the drapes.

“I think it might be safe to open these, since there’s no fire escape access on this side.”

“Go nuts,” says Penny, dunking her snickerdoodle.

Sheldon opens the curtains slowly, letting the last of the daylight in. He cracks one of the windows open, and the unfamiliar sound of a city without traffic filters in: birds, cicadas, and the distant sound of a dog barking. It sounds off somehow, like a recording of a dog played at half speed. The breeze that comes in stirs the air in the apartment, makes the hairs on Penny’s arms stand up. It doesn’t smell. She’s surprised by that; she’s grown used to the cloying background smell of bodies, and she’s aware that she herself doesn’t smell all that fantastic either.

“Maybe we should move over here,” she says. “There’d be more room for us both. We wouldn’t have to slee—share a bed.”

Sheldon looks like she’s just suggested they go live in Canada with a wolf pack. “Penny, I appreciate your newfound respect for my personal space, but I think that our current arrangement is best. Unless...” Now he looks lost and uncertain. “Do you _mind_ sharing your bed?”

“Nah,” Penny says as breezily as possible. “It’s not like you kick in your sleep.”

He doesn’t. But sometimes he does make quiet sobbing sounds that she doesn’t know how to fix.

Tonight is one of those nights; they’ve washed and changed into nightwear—PJs for him, a tank top and shorts for her—and Penny’s just drifting off to sleep when Sheldon’s breath hitches and a thick sob escapes him.

“Sheldon?”

He doesn’t answer. Penny thinks he is actually asleep. She rolls to her side and tentatively wraps her arm across his chest. He lets out a soft whimper, followed by Amy’s name, but then his breathing evens back out.

She falls asleep like that, her head tucked against his shoulder, his arms rigid at his sides.

* * *

The morning light filters in between the boards over the windows, angling across her eyes, an impolite wake-up call. Penny groans and Sheldon’s arms tighten around her in response.

Sometime during the night he’s curled around her, going from praying-mantis-straight to a tenaciously clinging roly poly. She’s wrapped up in him. He even has one leg tucked over hers, his foot behind her calves. If he really was an insect she’d be worried about him biting her head off. Or is that only after sex? She thinks it’s the female of the species that usually does the biting. And anyway, roly polys probably aren’t that violent.

“Sheldon,” she says.

“Amy?” His eyes open. “Penny.”

He doesn’t let go of her. She doesn’t let go of him. She kisses him, this time, and he returns the kiss, holding on tight. They exchange tentative kisses for a few minutes, until Penny slides her hand down to his ass and Sheldon pushes hard against her thigh.

Then, although there’s still clothes to be shed, bodies to be learned, places they could theoretically stop, it feels like the point of no return. Like something inevitable. She clings to him with mouth and hands and her legs wrapping around his waist.

She doesn’t expect much from him, but he surprises her with knowing touches, as if he and Leonard said more than good night through their shared bedroom wall, as if Leonard told him her body’s secrets. He still makes enough missteps for Penny to have to redirect him, and it’s comforting that he doesn’t get everything exactly right. It’s far from perfect, but she feels like that’s okay, like she shouldn’t set her expectations too high.

When she’s rolling the condom onto him, stroking him from tip to base, what she thinks of isn’t the difficulty of being pregnant, of having a baby in this strange new world. What she thinks of is Leslie’s wry smile as she cracked that awful joke about zombie semen, and of Leonard’s eyes the couple of times they talked about kids, and of Amy earnestly talking about how one day the day would come for her and Sheldon.

But then Penny pulls Sheldon down and he sinks into her, and Penny forgets everything except for the two of them.

* * *

After, she goes to shower, and the water pressure is failing. She cries for Leonard, and Amy, and herself. She feels hot, despite the chill of the water, like she’s sick and this is just a fever, just a dream.

Then she dries off, gets dressed, and cedes the bathroom to Sheldon, who kisses her awkwardly in an attempt at reassurance. Despite bathing her face with cold water, Penny’s pretty sure she still looks red-eyed and weepy.

She listens to him through the bathroom door, and he lets out a couple of harsh sobs, but she can’t bring herself to get up off the bed and go in there to comfort him. It’s not like they’d be taking a nice, cozy, warm shower together, just standing in a cold drizzle, and there’s no comfort in that.

She settles for changing the sheets, fluffing the pillows into new cases, and bundling everything into the laundry basket, which has been overflowing for some time now. The thought occurs that maybe it is Saturday, and that maybe tonight is laundry night. Even if it isn’t, they could load up the machines in the basement and see if they will work.

It’s funny. Penny’s been going without underwear, wearing shirts four, five, six times before discarding them as too dirty. She’s been eating cold canned food. She’s been letting herself go days without showering. But now Sheldon’s here, the routines that used to seem so irritating now seem desirable.

Sheldon comes out of the bathroom, towel wrapped around his waist, and looks pointedly at the heavily laden laundry basket. It’s almost like old times, albeit some bizarro version of old times where they’re sleeping together. She wonders idly if this would ever have happened if it hadn’t been for the end of the world, and then looks at the line of his hipbones and his long fingers and the way his upper arms flex when he bends down to pick up his discarded shirts, and stops questioning it.

“I think today needs to be Laundry Day,” he says, in that voice where she can hear the capital letters, and Penny laughs.

* * *

They dump everything straight down the elevator shaft—it can’t get any dirtier—and make the familiar trip down the stairs. The only thing that’s different is that Penny has a handgun shoved into her waistband, just in case.

There aren’t any zombies waiting for them between the fourth floor and the laundry room. She’s almost disappointed. She does get to force the lobby elevator doors open, though, to retrieve their laundry.

Sheldon examines each of the washing machines in turn, finally pronouncing one of them entirely unusable, but the others all right, provided that the plumbing doesn’t give out.

“We could really use Howard’s expertise here, although extrapolating from a space toilet to a washing machine might be beyond him.”

“Why’s that?” Penny asks, sorting whites, colors, bedlinen.

“I’m not sure he ever did his own laundry.”

Penny laughs, feels momentarily guilty, and then thinks: _If Howard_ was _here, he’d be laughing, too_.

It’s the start of trading jokes, jibes, and memories about their lost friends. Their friends and Sheldon’s girlfriend and her fiancé.

They’ve done their mourning. It’s time to do their memorializing.

* * *

Further to the memorializing concept, that night (after twelve loads of laundry, a full bottle of fabric softener, and more trips up the stairs with soggy clothing than she cares to count) they go out on the roof again and paint on the tall cinderblock wall. Sheldon has numerous tiny tins of enamel paint thanks to a brief flirtation with coloring his own figurines that didn’t turn out as well as hoped, and they make use of them all, one name after another.

There’s the didn’t-make-its, the ones who have been on a constant loop in Penny’s head since the beginning, and then there are the maybes. Various Coopers. Leslie Winkle, because Penny refuses to let go of the idea that she might not have been at Caltech when—well, when Caltech stopped being a university and started being a hole in the ground. Even taking into consideration the fact that some of the maybes are probably wishful thinking, it’s not too hopeless a list.

Then there’s them. The made-its.

Sheldon starts it by painting her name in his neat printing, doing it in orange because he doesn’t have any pink. Penny paints his name below hers, doing it in green because she doesn’t really believe in that gendered color bullshit. Besides, the bright colors make her think of paintball.

Her dad.

Leonard’s mom.

It’s too short a list when she once had 463 Facebook friends. Too short a list when she once had both parents and her brother and her sister, when Sheldon had Missy and Mary and Meemaw.

“We can move some of the maybes over here when we know for sure,” Penny says, not completing the thought that they can move some of the maybes to the didn’t-make-it list when they know for sure.

“Good idea,” Sheldon says, standing there with his brush in his hand, looking vaguely at the wall, not quite focusing on it, as if he’s seeing it through all the ghosts of all the didn’t-make-its.

“Do you want anything in particular for dinner?” Penny asks after a couple of uncomfortably quiet minutes.

“I think we should have something hot while we’re up here. We’ve spent a lot of time down in the basement.” Sheldon puts his brush down and starts toward the open door. “I have more to tell you about coming home, and I’d rather do it outside.”

* * *

They eat beef and vegetable soup with a fresh batch of Sheldon’s biscuits. Whether it’s Saturday night or not, it’s quiet, and when the sun begins to set Penny can see the stars earlier than she remembers ever seeing them before.

“The air’s starting to clear,” Sheldon says when she mentions it. “Less pollution means that we can see better.”

“Uh huh,” Penny says, buttering a biscuit.

“Enjoy it while it lasts.”

They’ve both heard the radio stories about how people are starting to rally, how the population will never be the same, especially in some areas (India, fuck, how can a whole _country_ be gone?), but the thought of going from what the world is now back to anything approaching normal is incredible. Penny ignores him with aplomb.

At least until they’ve finished eating, when he clears his throat in his here-comes-a-story way.

(She’s amazed when it doesn’t start out in Greece.)

“After the migraine cleared, I turned on the television, because it was late enough that it wasn’t worth trying to get to the Convention Center for any of Preview Night. As it turned out, the Convention Center was already under quarantine by the time I woke up. It was just a blip on the news, but when I got online, it was all over the internet.”

“Do you think someone was trying to cover it up?”

“If they were, it didn’t stick. You can’t drop a bomb and expect everyone in the surrounding area not to notice.”

There are probably quite a lot of Pacific Islanders out there who would agree with him, Penny thinks, remembering history class.

“So then what?”

“I started calling people.” He reaches out and covers her hand with his. “I tried Leonard first, then Amy, then you. I couldn’t get through to any of you. I left the hotel and tried to go down to the Convention Center, but there was a police blockade. Sniper rifles are a lot more intimidating than paintball guns.”

“Where did you go?”

Sheldon takes a deep breath. “I went back to the hotel. I watched the Convention Center from the roof.” He looks unthinkingly toward Caltech. “I watched until the smoke stopped rising. It took... a while.”

Penny can understand the imprecision of time. She still isn’t sure if today is Saturday.

“The news started talking about other outbreaks.” He hitches in another deep breath. Penny picks up her Diet Coke can—lukewarm but still fizzy—with her free hand and offers it to him; Sheldon takes a drink and then sets it back down on the table. “I put some socks and underpants in my laptop bag. The planes were grounded. There weren’t any buses. I started walking.”

“Oh, Sheldon.” She can picture all the long miles between here and San Diego. “I’m surprised your feet weren’t worse.”

“I put it down to the stairs.”

He has a point.

“I had calculated my maximum walking speed at ten miles per day, given my level of physical fitness and the relatively basic terrain between there and here, but I hadn’t taken the zombie apocalypse into account.”

“You usually do,” Penny says as lightly as possible.

“I know. But when I realized what was going on, I had to readjust my calculations and my route—and my luggage. My laptop is somewhere in Solana Beach.” His fingers entwine easily with hers, now. “I traded it in for a handgun. It didn’t pack as much punch as a shotgun like yours, but I couldn’t carry anything heavier.”

“Traded it in?”

Sheldon shrugs. “Dropped it on the counter after I hit the owner in the head with it. I was surprised he was a zombie. I would have thought—with all those guns, I would have thought it would be easy to take a permanent exit.”

She doesn’t have to ask if _he_ thought about it, because she knows he did, because she knows _she_ did. Sheldon might think they’re both dreamers, but she knows that when it comes right down to it, they’re both fighters.

* * *

The rest of the story is simple for him to tell and hard for her to hear. His days, like hers, blurred together, except while she was gathering the courage to go out for food, he was walking. Sneaking, really, through each cluster of buildings. Making more progress outside of town except where car wrecks had led to clusters of hungry undead.

He’d tried resting in the daytime and walking at night, but after two close calls, daylight had proven to be the safer option for traveling. He’d also tried counting how many zombies he’d shot but had given up.

(Penny knows exactly how many she shot in the first week, because she knows how many of their neighbors got infected. After that, it’s anyone’s guess.)

Sheldon had had to detour inland at San Onofre because the nuclear power plant was burning.

“I saw it from miles away, so I could adjust my route accordingly, but it wasn’t easy.” He draws a line on the wooden table top with a pencil that’s the curve of the beach and then scribbles a series of inverted Vs for mountains. “I had to try, though.”

“Sheldon... you didn’t even know if I’d survived or not.”

He has a classic stubborn look on his face. “You were the only one who _might_ have.”

Maybe frequent trips up and down the stairs helped him out for walking the freeway, but the hills were another prospect. He’d found rest and respite in a tiny town after some days spent jumping at every rustle in the trees. The place was so small that when he’d tried to look it up on his failing phone, he discovered that even the Google Street View car hadn’t made it there.

“Whoever lived there had left,” he says, leaning against Penny a little as if to reassure himself that she, at least, is still there. “I was scared to yell, but there were only two or three cars.”

“Shame you never learned to drive.”

“I did think of that. But then when I got back to the freeway I would have been stuck behind wrecks all over again.”

He’d spent a few days recovering in the small town, found fresh ammunition for his gun and food for his belly, and then pressed on toward Pasadena. Along the way he’d developed sniffles, then a cough, and then a fever. He’d wandered off the road and ended up climbing fences (earning multiple bruises in the process) and then running from guard dogs more than once. The bigger dogs were slow, many struggling to walk, infected with whatever was making people into zombies. It was the smaller watchdogs that were the problem: lively, pissed-off terriers that yapped and chased him.

“If they were okay...” Penny trails off.

“Yes?”

“Maybe Cinnamon’s still out there somewhere.”

“Maybe so.”

The rest of the story is uneventful: Sheldon eventually found his way home, staggered up the stairs, and passed out on her doorstep.

And now here they are.

She does have one last question for him, though, before the chilly night air drives them inside. “What would you have done if I—if I hadn’t been here?”

Sheldon smiles. “Turned around and walked to Texas.”

Penny believes him.

* * *

They turn to each other without hesitation that night. Sheldon murmurs his appreciation of the clean sheets, as if discussing fresh linen is his idea of pillow talk. (Maybe it is.)

They take more time than that morning. Penny has both less and more patience with Sheldon’s explorations and is quicker to guide him. Sheldon in return lets her linger over the waning yellow crescents of bruises across his ribs, tracing them with her fingertips and lips. He is still too thin, but she probably is as well.

For all his inexperience, Sheldon is a fast learner, and Penny a willing teacher.

She straddles his hips, using her position to show him a little about what changing rhythms can do, and watches his eyes widen gratifyingly. She spans his chest with her hands and does most of the work with her thighs. Tense. Relax. Squeeze. His eyes roll right back at that, which makes her giggle.

She hasn’t done that in a while.

“Penny—Penny, please—”

“Use your words,” she says, but for once in his life it seems Sheldon is speechless.

Penny no longer feels like she’s dreaming.

In fact, she feels like she’s finally woken up.

* * *

Three days later, a Range Rover laden with supplies and bearing a hastily rigged CB antenna noses its way along Pasadena’s streets, bound south and east. 

**Author's Note:**

> The line "Saved from the zombie apocalypse by something as mundane as a migraine." was cribbed almost verbatim, but with permission, from ishie's fic [_Stay Classy, San Diego_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/36162).


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